Yucheng Liu

The development in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has advanced healthcare. The direction of healthcare has been transformed from treatment to health management. Thus, more data are being generated and aggregated than ever before while healthcare moves toward patient-oriented and analytic application. This paper discusses the different aspects of smart healthcare along with the health data and patient-oriented health management.

BACKGROUND: In addition to genetic variation, epigenetic variation plays an important role in determining various biological processes. The importance of natural genetic variation to crop domestication and improvement has been widely investigated. However, the contribution of epigenetic variation in crop domestication at population level has rarely been explored. RESULTS: To understand the impact of epigenetics on crop domestication, we investigate the variation of DNA methylation during soybean domestication and improvement by whole-genome bisulfite sequencing of 45 soybean accessions, including wild soybeans, landraces, and cultivars. Through methylomic analysis, we identify 5412 differentially methylated regions (DMRs). These DMRs exhibit characters distinct from those of genetically selected regions. In particular, they have significantly higher genetic diversity. Association analyses suggest only 22.54% of DMRs can be explained by local genetic variations. Intriguingly, genes in the DMRs that are not associated with any genetic variation are enriched in carbohydrate metabolism pathways. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides a valuable map of DNA methylation across diverse accessions and dissects the relationship between DNA methylation variation and genetic variation during soybean domestication, thus expanding our understanding of soybean domestication and improvement.

The ubiquitous connectivity between the things in a supply chain ecosystem will contribute to the information flow essential for establishing smart solutions for efficient, reliable, and intelligent supply chain operations. In this article, a new model integrating supply chain and IoT, referred to as SCoT, is proposed to evolve into SSCE and thus enhance supply chain productivity. Productivity in this article considers not only the rate of product output but also product quality and the rate of new product development. First, the ubiquitous and ultra-reliable connectivity necessary for connecting all things in SCoT is newly defined. Four fundamental applications in SSCE are identified, and four related use cases are discussed. Seamless information access in the fully connected SCoT network will facilitate supply chain management. A novel universal SCoT platform is thus proposed to perform intelligent operations on quality measurement, product integration, and decision making. Hitherto, there is no universal standard that quantitatively grades all Supply Chain of Things with a single indicator. To ensure the platform's objectiveness and consistency, an emerging IoT standard of IEEE P2668, namely IDex, is incorporated into the platform. IDex provides quantitative measurement, grading, and ranking of all IoT things. In addition, IDex also benefits the platform by contributing three extra functions to advise on a solution for quality improvement, integration guidance, and performance prediction. Ultimately, SCoT will proliferate five key impacts on automated quality control, efficient integration, smart transportation, intelligent decision making, and end-to-end traceability. Finally, three key future research directions in the implementation of SCoT are discussed.